Your Prescription Isn't Private!

Prescription Privacy?

January 2nd, 2008

Chalk up another win for Big Pharma, as we lose our privacy so they can make more sales.

Apparently, a federal district judge believes – and has ruled – that a corporation’s first amendment rights trumps our human right to privacy. That’s right. According to that judge, prescriptions aren’t private, at least from the doctor’s side of things. In fact, keeping a doctor’s prescription-writing habits private and confidential “violates the Constitution.” And, in his opinion, so did the Maine law that allowed that information to remain confidential.

How did this all end up in court? Some corporations that make a practice of selling information about people’s prescriptions got pretty ticked off when the Maine courts said those records were confidential. Those medical data corporations (namely IMS Health, Wolters Kluwer Health, and VeriSpan) took their case to a higher court and won. After all, they can’t make any money if they don’t sell our private medical information to Big Pharma, who need it so they can better direct-market unnecessary and possibly dangerous drugs to us and our doctors.

But, really, they’re doing all of this for our own good. (Oh, Sure) Here’s one “important” reason, cited by the corporations, that they need access to this information (and permission to trade on it): It will help “monitor the safety of new drugs.” That sound you hear is me laughing so hard I’m crying. Because we all know a system designed to sell information about doctors’ prescription-writing habits to the drug companies is really focused on selling more (and more expensive) drugs…and not on protecting us from the problems associated with those drugs.

The federal district court judge on this case followed a similar ruling from earlier this year that struck down a New Hampshire prescription privacy law. And now another similar case involving a Vermont law is being tried in federal court. In the mean time, Maine intends to appeal this ridiculous, scary ruling. And hopefully someone in the federal government will realize that the constitution is supposed to protect people, not profits.